The Shack of O'Dell Hunter, K5ILL (SK)

O'Dell (K5ILL) and wife Dorrthy

By Keith (KN5G) - This morning I had the rare privilege of visiting the shack of a fellow HAM that I had never met. O’Dell Hunter, K5ILL, of Henderson, Texas is now a Silent Key, but I enjoyed visiting with him vicariously today through some of his personal items that have survived him over the years. A quick search on the Internet when I got back home revealed that O’Dell had passed away in 1980. His wife, Dorothy, just recently passed away in March of this year, explaining the estate sale being held at their home, and how I happened to discover O’Dell’s “Shack”.

Suzanne, a friend of mine was helping with an estate sale being held at the Hunter’s home. She recognized a framed Texas Radio Operator’s license plate from 1975, and knowing that I might be interested in some of the amateur radio related items gave me a phone call and suggested that I come and look through some of them.

Arriving at the estate sale, there were two cardboard boxes of QSL cards on the living room floor that O’Dell had collected over the years. Many of these cards were from Europe, Africa, and South America. Most were dated in the mid to late fifties, about the time I was born. I wish I would have had the time to look through each of them. As a fellow HAM, I know that each QSL card held a very special memory for O’Dell. I have a few paper QSL cards myself that I cherish, but most of my contact confirmations are electronic, buried somewhere in the memory of my personal computer, or

Coverage Map added to About Us Page

by Dave (W5CWT) I was wanting a nice way to represent our repeater's (N5RCA) coverage area. I stumbled across a nice online service that allows you to create good-looking coverage maps. The site is called Radio Mobile Online. It is very bi-lingual (both French and English) so don't let that throw you.

Basically, you create a free account, then log on and you can create multiple coverage maps. Make note that elevations and heights are in meters, not feet. You can change a variety of parameters including frequency, type of antenna and even line loss.

I created a coverage map based on our current situation (as closely as I could guess) and it looks very accurate based on signal reports we've received. I put a link to the image on the "About Us" page in the discussion of the repeater.